About Me

My life was described by one of my editors as “impossibly exotic” – although really it was not my life, but me, that was the exotic, the uprooted plant, the one who didn’t belong, always living in someone else’s backyard...
Now I am back in Australia, the returning native learning to live where I was born. Writer, traveler, environmentalist. Author of The Isles of Glory trilogy (The Aware, Gilfeather, The Tainted); The Mirage Makers trilogy (Heart of the Mirage, Shadow of Tyr, Song of the Shiver Barrens); The Stormlord trilogy The Last Stormlord, Stormlord Rising, Stormlord's Exile, and writing as Glenda Noramly, a stand-alone book Havenstar. LATEST:
THE FORSAKEN LANDS
A clash of cultures and magic as traders and buccaneers hunt for spices and wealth in the Va-forsaken half of the world ... even as the unidentified darkness of plague and murder stalks their own land.
THE LASCAR'S DAGGER and THE DAGGER'S PATH available worldwide now! Final book, THE FALL OF THE DAGGER out mid-April.

It's inspired by the tragedy of the latest natural disaster, in the Philippines, but it was the final paragraphs that really got to me, about how countries "ought to spend less figuring out how to kill one another and
more trying to stop nature from prematurely killing us"... and "the high probability that advanced civilisations destroy
themselves."

Which is why

we never hear any intelligent life out there speaking us.

The universe is silent.

"In other words,

this silent universe is conveying

not a
flattering lesson about our uniqueness

but a tragic story about our
destiny.

It is telling us that intelligence may be

the most cursed
faculty in the entire universe—

an endowment not just ultimately fatal
but,

on the scale of cosmic time,

near instantly so."

And we in Australia have blithely and selfishly elected a government which seems to believe that anything that makes therich richer benefits all (in spite of all proof to the contrary)

and that there's no such thing as global warming and climate change (also in spite of massive evidence to the contrary.)

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

As those of you know me well, or who have been reading this blog over the years will realise -- I have loved the tropical rainforest. Its grandeur, its wild exuberance, its overstated, overpowering, magnificent fecundity. I've tramped and camped in places that appear so wild and lonely you can imagine yourself to be the only human being ever to have come that way (you'd probably be wrong, of course, but that's the way it feels.)

But one thing it hasn't got much of, at least not noticeably, are the flowering plants like these (although a single tropical forest tree may have -- quite literally -- millions of individual blooms...). To find wild flowers in adundance you must come to Australia, specifically Western Australia. No other place has so many varieties in such a small area -- an abundance of epidemics that is staggering. And in Spring, well, everywhere you look.

Links

Awards

BEST FANTASY NOVEL OF THE YEAR Shortlisted Finalist2003: for The Aware; 2004: for The Tainted; 2006: for Heart of the Mirage; 2007: for The Song of the Shiver Barrens; 2009: for The Last Stormlord 2010: for Stormlord Rising 2011: for Stormlord's Exile 2014: The Lascar's Dagger 2015: The Dagger's Path 2016: The Fall of the Dagger